CEM and Consumer-brand Relationships

Customer Experience Management (CEM) was the hot topic of the Adobe Partner Community Day last week in Barcelona. It was great to learn more about Adobe’s CEM strategy, and how the additions of Omniture and Day to their existing product portfolio play into that. Adobe is on the way of creating an integrated platform which helps enterprises realize great Customer Experiences across digital channels.

While this is definitely exciting, will the implementation of such a platform also be sufficient to build lasting consumer-brand relationships, which is the ultimate goal of CEM? We at SapientNitro are convinced that besides solving the technology challenge there are three other dimensions that need to be addressed. In the first place this is the organizational challenge. Most enterprises are still organized like in the 50’s. They have siloed departments taking care of different phases of the customer lifecycle, like marketing, commerce and customer service. In order to create a harmonized experience across all touchpoints, including the digital and the real world like traditional ads, stores and call centers, it is most crucial for enterprises to first transform their organization.

The other two dimensions that enterprises need to evolve in order to cope with today’s multi-channel reality are their marketing and their user experience strategy.

Only if all of these four dimensions – organization, marketing, user experience and technology – are addressed in an integrated fashion, companies will be able to create outstanding customer experiences across the complete customer lifecycle, virtually as well as in the real world.